Valerie van Zuijlen, Rear TerrariumAn interactive video essay about the director watching watchers watch the director watching watchers watch. The spectacle of the Other, the watchers, whom safely contained within a fishbowl realism, a “conscious invisible” aquarium wall separating them from the directors “unconscious visible” within the observational narration of digital storytelling. However the gaze is returned as hyperlinks provide the watchers with a rear window view, containing the unseen. A rather intimate self-reflective personalisation of creating a sense of Intimacy through Technology.
Link Project: https://www.thinglink.com/channelcard/1124917971534217218
Link Manuscript Project: https://vvz203.wordpress.com/manuscript/
Link on Blog: https://vvz203.wordpress.com/final-project/

Haneul Lee. “Virtual Mnemonic Project: Voice Reimagined.” “Virtual Mnemonic Project: Voices Reimagined” is a web-based interactive display of multiple media and texts relating to the imaginatively personalized accounts that are co-opted to form a picture of state-sanctioned violence in history. Deeply inspired by the aesthetics and methodologies of Chris Marker’s Immemory (1998) and Level Five (1997), this virtual memory project is designed to retrieve an ambiguous surface memory corresponding to the particular dehumanizing event—such as the Holocaust and the Jeju Uprising, referring to the state-led massacre of Jeju Islanders between April 3, 1948, and September 21, 1954, in Korea. Reframed as fiction in the digital space, imaginative memory-construction has the potential of reinvigorating the voices of survivors and victims of those historical atrocities traditionally excluded from the grand narrative of history. This project takes two literary works as primary sources: Hyun Giyeong’s Sunisamch’on (1978) and Maurice Blanchot’s The Instant of My Death (1994). By quoting sentences delivered from the fictional witnesses in the two stories, I created a new fictional dialogue—which is linguistically both mutable and irreconcilable—between the witnesses to function as a salient object of this project. What both the first-person and third-person witnesses testify is not only the history of genocides but also that there is a potential for memory to be reactivated, deviated, and deactivated simultaneously. The memory is not only rememorized but also dememorized in the specific formulae of digital historiography as well. Such a potential fault of reclaiming history in the digital space was taken as the departure point for this project in exploring the dualism of imaginarily reactivated memory of the state-sanctioned violence and its aftermaths in digital space through the creation of a new dialogue between the reimagined subjects in history. Access the project here.

Jia Li. TimeCapsule19XX is, literally, a time capsule, that intends to capsule time in the digital space. It is primarily about the nature of time and the relations between (digitized) history and memories. It is an experiment with digital photos with time stamps as a reminder of the time that has left its own flow and became a marker in the domain of the past. These wrong markers not only demonstrate the failure of digital technologies’ automated-ness in assisting with accurate recollection but also imply the non-linearity of the past in an anachronistic manner. Within the project, there are multiple layers of disruptions that may give the users an illusion of time-traveling experience. The users are welcomed to explore the project anytime, even before the capsule is ready to be dug up. FYI, a countdown timer is hidden on the front page. Hover to discover (more)!

Recommendation: view on a computer or a laptop with Firefox/Microsoft Edge. If you are using Chrome, find a way to enable auto-play sound. Don’t forget to subscribe to get a reminder (probably in 2038)!

The purpose of this project is describing and feeling the world by sounds. Also, the project intends to memorize moments in life and connect with friends through audio clips. I intend to create a different impression of the world by sound. Listen to You is created on a website, and people can hear different kinds of audio clips by clicking relative locations and cities. Besides, they can upload their own recordings under different tags, and they can mix different voices together to create a unique sound story or emotion.

Tia Sun, Song map of New York City.Has a song on the car stereo, or in a store, recently caught you off guard and brought back a tidal wave of memories? When people listen to songs, there might be a memory interaction. This project is an interactive sonic map of New York City with personal memory visualization.The purpose of this project is to study the relationship on how memory is driven by sound and how sound creates the sense of immersive, as well as an exploration of a new form of psychogeography. Let’s Listen to the Map: Map Part & Memory Part

Finding Mr. Park is a virtual game about the existence of zainichi Koreans (Koreans in Japan) [1] during USA’s nuclear bombing of Hiroshima in 1945. Ostensibly, the game is about the search for a toy boat which the Japanese boy Gen wishes to retrieve for his brother’s funeral. Yet, as the detective Conan follows the trail of Mr. Park in search of the toy, the Korean victims of the nuclear attack are revealed. This game attempts to provide a fictional counterfactual history (in the vein of Roger Hillman) of the Hiroshima bombing which was often branded as an incident which happened to the “sole victim (Japan) of the atomic bomb” in a nationalistic sense. To insert a neglected history into the mainstream, I appropriated the forms plots of the well-known animation series, Detective Conan and the manga Barefoot Gen. Due to limited time and resources, a game-playing video was made to present how the game may take form in real life.

Adipose Tissue is an immersive art piece produced in the open source game engine unity 3d, using various 3d art workflows and tools such as Zbrush, mixamo.com, crazybump, substance painter, blender, and the structure sensor 3d scanner. The piece uses the C# coding language and existing algorithms such as ken perlin’s perlin noise and craig reynolds’ boids flocks to observe and formally study the use of computational approaches to randomization, emergence, and generativity. Aesthetically and materially, the piece draws on fatness, stretch marks, and cellulite to interface these emergent algorithms with the emergent properties of fat bodies in movement. Reading through fat studies and andrei lepecki’s study on singularity, along with the enduring project of post-structuralist critiques of subject-formation in gender, race, and post-human/computational studies, the project seeks to investigate new parameters for the expression, or production, of selfhood in the digital, in conversation with artists such as Jonathan Couette, Kiki Smith, Shoog Mcdaniels, and Jacolby Satterwhite. Most specifically, the piece seeks to advance a conversation around Deleuze Studies between affect and topology, hypothesizing that generative approaches to topology in computational art may provide for new research avenues for the mapping of affect with special relevance to network activism.

Curtis Russell, “Screen-to-Stage Musicals: The Online Home for a Much-Maligned Genre” Access the project here.

This project is an online database of the screen-to-stage musical (i.e. The Producers, The Band’s Visit, and King Kong: The Musical), along with a bibliography of scholarly writing on the subject. To my knowledge, there is no database in existence devoted to the screen-to-stage musical, beyond a slipshod Wikipedia “category” page[1], nor is there much critical writing on the genre, despite its increasing dominance of Broadway stages. The Internet Broadway Database (IBDB), similarly to IMDB, does allegedly contain entries on every show to ever run on Broadway, but it is not searchable by genre. An important component of my dissertation (and future conference papers) will be establishing the validity of the screen-to-stage Broadway musical as a worthy object of study; this database is intended to jumpstart that process, serving not just my own research but that of anyone interested in the genre, within or without the academy.

<>’s Scrapbook is a real scrapbook that tells a linear story about its author. More importantly, it isa representation of personal archives. Consisting of three chapters—the past, the present, and the future, the scrapbook unfolds a series of personal memories in time order to illustrate how people archive their memories. Not only the forms but also the contents of people’s memories have been changed through the transformation of tools which people use to restore their memories, from the traditional ways by using a real scrapbook to digital database archives like social media. This scrapbook tries to expand the “fever” or habits of using digital database archives to a physical world, not merely in the cyberspace and virtual world. Readers could find some metaphors and typical examples of digital database archives presented in a real book with the help of handworks. This project tries to demonstrate the homogenization of our memories resulted from digital database archives and imagine a dystopia in which people share the same memories with this homogenization.